GeIL Evo Corsa 8GB 2133CL9 Dual Channel Kit Review

In the last few months the major hardware spotlights where briefly focused on AMD's Zambezi platform and now more and more on Intels high end Sandy Bridge E platform. Though let us not forget what Intel refers to as the mainstream platform aka socket 1155 Sandy Bridge goodness. The brand new E version requires quad channel action, it's little brethren only in need of dual channel. Todays GeIL dual channel 8Gb kit, comprises for you wiz kids out of two 4Gb dimms at 2133Mhz rated speeds. No cutbacks on timings : CL9-11-9-27 is pretty good stuff. Usually we see high quantity kits running at low speeds (1600ish Mhz) On top of that usually coincides with sluggish timings too. For those that are a bit confused by the brand name : GeIL stands for Golden Emperor International Limited, nothing more and nothing less. Pretty sure most were thinking of something else. Let's open up the kit and see what we can do with this high end 8Gb kit.

More Overclocking Fun

As some of the reviewers at the Shrimps still love to push things we tried to get TRCD stable at 10 iso 11. Trying to get the same performance as the higher specced 9-10-9-28 kit. That's what most overclockers started off with : pushing your hardware up to at least the specs of that hardware piece you just couldn't afford. At least I did lol.

Our entire test suite was stable with 9-10-9-27 1T at 1.74Vdimm, sadly it failed the memtest torture test. So sadly no inclusion of them results in this review. Below is a SuperPi 32M shot to show you we are not faking.

What about higher clock frequencies ? At first we only reached 2200Mhz CL9-11-10 with 1.72Vdimm. It all seemed to stop there. Really not bad for a 4gb dimm kit, as even some cheap 2gb dimms don't even manage do that.

Just a while after we received this kit, there was a RAM competition at HWbot. One of the stages was to get the best SuperPi 32M time in, but it had to be done with 4Gb dimms and at a Cas Latency of 6. Initial testing around 1.7ish Vdimm kept us just below 1520Mhz. Far from ideal, as some overclockers were pushing over 1600Mhz. After messing with a lot of sub timings and most importantly pumping more volts we knackered 1677Mhz. We got these GeIls running 32M stable at CL6-8-7-18 at 1.83Vdimm. Bundled that RAM combo with Gamers cherry 5.85Ghz 2600K CPU and we were rocking. Too bad in the end we were just a few hundreds of a second short of grabbing first spot.

But back to more reasonable voltages now. After the Competition I rechecked the state of our two Evo Corsa sticks. They still seemed in mint condition, passing the multiple instances of Memtest flawlessly at 2133Mhz. Time to explore if they still could go to 2200Mhz with the same timings. Checked, tried a bit more, more, and more till we errorred out at 2252Mhz. Say what 2252Mhz CL9 ? We gained 50mhz lol, completely stable in our memtest suite at just 1.69Vdimm.

Now I'm really impressed ! Seemed our extreme voltages, somehow burned in the IC's. And these babies just got better. Time to give them a respin in a few tests to see how the extra Mhz impacts the outcome. We just compared them versus the 2133Mhz clocks. Keep in mind the small CPU speed advantage of 35Mhz (4535Mhz vs 4500Mhz) for the 2250Mhz results.

As you noticed there's a tiny performance gain. Though to be honest, running daily at 105.6Bclock is not a good idea. But that's ofcourse all part of the deal when overclocking and exploring new limits... But the above really show off the potential of these GeIL dimms.